wtf

Eurovision

Oh my fucking christ... Ireland have only gone and entered Jedward for Eurovision [BBC].

Help, help, a rodent bit my penis

It gets no better [BBC].

ITV's short on talent

Anyone see the National Television Awards last night? Anyone other than me thinking that they really seem to be running low on celebrities?

So the show was introduced by Dermot O'Leary, who, had I not been forced against my will to watch several episodes of X-Factor, I would never have heard of. They then began the typical "and here to present the next award is [insert name of some unrelated celebrity here]". Then it started getting silly... "And next to present an award is Luis Urzua, one of the miners who was stuck down a hole in Chile a few months back. Oh and by the way, he doesn't actually speak a word of English". Er... yeah, nice sentiment, but who the fuck thought that would be a good idea? After Señor Urzua had failed to disguise the fact that he had no idea what was going on, it turned out that Dermot himself was up for an award so he actually left the stage and handed the mike over to Jonathan Ross for one poxy award, before coming back to continue the show afterwards. I'm guessing they knew before the show started that Dermot was up for an award, it's been on the web for quite some time, so why not get Jonathan to present the whole show? Oh, sorry, I forgot, ITV can't afford him, and Dermot is undoubtebly far cheaper. Amusingly, Ant and Dec won the award anyway, and they couldn't even be arsed to turn up - Simon Cowell collected the award on their behalf. But that didn't stop ITV from dedicating about 10 minutes of screen time to the idiotic pair via a supposedly live feed. At the end of the show they actually ran out of celebrities to present awards, so had to go up to the public audience and pull two kids out to present the award for 'Best Serial Drama', ironically won by Eastenders, a flagship show of ITV's rival, the BBC. Meanwhile, Dara O'Briain was tweeting from the event and informed all his followers that one of the people in the crowd was Gillian McKeith and the three women around him were all seat-fillers because the people who were supposed to be sat there hadn't turned up.

Remind me again... exactly why does ITV still exist?

It's a cow

You know that advert for yoghurt with the cow who wants to be a horse running down the beach in slow motion with an 80's power ballad accompaniment?

Now, apparently, they can do showjumping too [telegraph.co.uk].

It's game time

Not done a video game post for a while now. While the Wii and now the XBox360 attempt to do away with traditional controllers, here's two novel games I'm quite looking forward to playing.

Firstly, Ghostwire. Augmented reality is something that's been floating around universities for a while now, and what with smartphones with built-in cameras and accelerometers becoming the norm there's been some rather cool apps that use the technology. I've yet to see anything truly useful, but there's loads of really cool stuff. Ghostwire uses AR as a game mechanism - it runs on the Nintendo DSi, which has a back-mounted camera. You play by wandering around the room or wherever you happen to be, and the screen shows your actual view. Sometimes you'll encounter ghosts, some friendly, some nasty. Not sure if the game has any kind of plot or online play, or if it's just a tech demo disguised as a game, but it's definately cool not just because it's using an emerging technology but because it's actually a really novel way of engaging the player within the game.

On a completely different note, Sega have surpassed themselves with their novelty items. As if a video game based entirely around shaking maracas wasn't mad enough, they've now developed Toylets, a game probably not coming soon to a urinal near you (unless you live in Tokyo). Basically, the game consists of a small screen above a urinal and a bunch of sensors, and you play various mini-games by pissing. Which is nice. You can use your urine stream to clean a wall of graffiti, try to fill a bottle, or if you have a particularly powerful stream you can attempt to lift a young lady's dress, Marylin Monroe style. Amazingly, each device has a USB port so you can save your highest scores and take them home.

Kleeneze

A fortnight ago, I went through the daily ritual of coming in from work, picking up everything on the doormat that had been posted through the letterbox and disposing of the 80% of it not in an envelope and addressed to either Shell or myself. One of these objects was a Kleeneze catalogue. A few days later we had a little note through the door informing us that someone called to collect the catalogue but we weren't in, so please leave it on the doorstep.

After consulting with various people I now know that Kleeneze delivery people generally expect you to do this because they re-use the catalogues. Had I been someone who actually has time to read every piece of crap that comes through my letterbox, I'd have known this. But hey, shit happens, and on the plus side they probably won't bother coming back. Or so I thought.

Every day for the past two weeks we've had a note through the door saying that someone called but nobody was in, please leave the catalogue on the mat tomorrow. On Fridays they even cross out the 'tomorrow' and hand-write 'Monday' on it. After two weeks, personally, I would have given up. I was beginning to get a bit annoyed with the continual notes through the door for me to leave out a catalogue that is probably festering in a landfill site as we speak. But then something happened that made me laugh.

Today I came home and found the familiar white slip of paper, only this time it was written in polish.

Life imitating slapstick

Man viciously beaten over poo-in-handbag

The Hazards of URL Shorteners

Anyone who uses Twitter or writes articles with a character limit will love the many URL shorteners on the net. If you have a URL such as 'http://www.somehost.com/path/path/more/wibble/filename.html?blah.blah=blah' or similar you can poke it into something like bit.ly and get a much shorter version. The shortener service simply handles the URL and redirects to the real site.

Obviously the main concern is that you don't know what you're clicking on. A link to bit.ly/12345 could lead to anything from hardcore porn to the official Dora the Explorer website, you just have to trust whoever sent you the link. But it's not always trusting the link creator to not be an arsehole, you also have to trust their spelling, as this story [infoworld.com] shows.

In a nutshell, California politician and ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman, or one of her staff, recently posted a shortened link on her official Twitter feed to a news article about local police support for her campaign. What tweeters got when they clicked the link was a YouTube video of a tall, long-haired oriental gentleman in a pink tutu playing the bass guitar. I'm not entirely sure what moral can be drawn from this, other than to be careful when using URL shorteners. That and the fact that anything, no matter how surreal, that you can possibly think of (as well as some stuff you couldn't) exists somewhere on the net.

This is not just any old box

May be old hat to some, but yesterday I witnessed, for the first time, a show on ITV entitled "The Cube". Basically, the idea is that a contestant, cheered on by a group of his mates who are there for no apparent reason at all, stands in a hoofing great glass cube and has to perform some menial task. Think Crystal Maze with absolutely no imagination. And I mean no imagination because the tasks range from 'press the button when the light comes on' to 'pick up some balls and put them in a tube'. It's possibly the most unintentionally hilarious example of polishing a turd that I've ever seen, as the whole thing is filmed with unnecessary slow motion, outrageous CG augmentations and even bullet-time shots. There are strategy conversations with the host, Phillip Scofield, which cover the task down to virtually sub-atomic level, futuristic theming, and lots of pulse-pounding bass in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that you're watching a bloke in a box picking up some plastic balls.

It has a sort of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' feel in that the tasks themselves last seconds but it's dressed up with so much bullshit by the host and by the format of the show (and almost US-levels of commercial breaks) that they somehow manage to stretch 10 minutes of actual games across a whole 60 minutes of channel time. Again, borrowing from Millionaire we have the 'cash ladder' graphics (rendered in post-production on to the shot as if they are visible to the contestant) and the 'lifelines' which in this game involve 'Trial Run', allowing a contestant a chance to try a game before comitting to it, and 'Simplify' which involves - er - picking up less balls, presumably.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... I'm so glad we still have the BBC, or innovation on TV would have been dead long ago.

What

Shallow diver breaks world record for paddling pool jump [BBC].

He looks so happy. As would I be. I think.

Who stole all the pies

There was a raid at the weekend [BBC] in one of the garden centres along Allington Lane. The items stolen: 48 pies, 18 pieces of cod and a box of jumbo sausages. Either someone wants to open their own chip shop, or some poor stoner's got a lethal case of the munchies.