Bobbins

Anna goes to see a play. Funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while.

Child Exploitation – the real story

So, Manchester United are heading a campaign to stamp out child exploitation. All very worthwhile – except that all the newspapers and programmes were full of images of the Man U team when they made a trip to Thailand – and were filmed at some school/refuge for exploited kids. And now they’re doing photoshoots with loads of kids.

Call me cynical, but aren’t they exploiting the children too? Building up the Man U brand by looking all cute and caring? And are they now an ethical team? Do they shun Nike footwear and boots (famously made in Thai sweatshops) in order to help stamp out child labour and sweatshops. Do they cobblers. It’s all for the nice public face of Man United – and they’ll hope you forget about the Nike stuff, and the protests about them using boots made of kangaroo leather.

Maintenance

My apologies to anyone who was looking at this site recently and found it was bringing up errors.

I decided to delete everything and start again, because the “photos” directory got renamed. I won’t go into all the whys and wherefores, but basically I was getting a lot of hits out of google’s Image Search which I wasn’t happy about, so I’ve now renamed the directory, and left a few additional bits in the robots file to mean Google shouldn’t index it any more.

I may explain more at another time, but for now I’m going to see if this cures the “problem” and go from there.

Normal service is now resumed, and all the images should be repointing to the proper place. If they don’t, please be so kind as to let me know. *Grin*

I’m a crap git

Last weekend, I got a call from the illustrious parents. We were trying to organise a weekend when all three of us were free so they could come up to see little old me. Having gone through diaries etc., we decided that the next one we were all available on was March 21st.

Excpet I’m not free that weekend at all – I’m seeing Avril Lavigne in concert, and have friends over here. So I’ve now got to call the parents and say “Ooops, I’m a shit git, how about the weekend after?” At the current rate, I’ll end up seeing them in May sometime.

Trust and Buried

Over the last five weeks, I’ve got more and more into the new BBC series Trust. Scripted by Simon Block, who I thought (I was wrong) also wrote Channel 4’s legal drama “North Square” (sadly not chosen for another series), it’s been basically a drama set in a lawyer’s office in London. Starring Robson Greene, and the BBC’s new favourite actress, Sarah Parish, it started off fairly mediocre, but has definitely been a stunner of a series. Legal dramas, or dramas set in legal offices, seemed to have hit their nadir back in the late 80’s and early 90s, but with both North Square and Trust there’s some hope for the genre yet. I hope it’ll get optioned for a second series.

Over the same run-time, Channel 4 has had “Buried“, a drama that again should be mediocre and cliched, starring Lennie James as a new man in prison, one who believes he’s innocent. But the series hasn’t descended into cliches – instead it’s been an absolute tour-de-force of scripting and acting. I don’t know how it will turn out, but I want to find out – and again, I’ll be hoping for a second series.

Both of them have been really exceptional character-driven dramas, well scripted, stunningly acted, and ultimately well worth watching. In fact, I’d probably get both of them on DVD if/when they’re released in that format.

It’s just a pity that these are the type of series that stands out, and becomes worthy of attention for that fact, rather than being simply the kind of drama we should expect from current scriptwriters.

Keffed links

Yes, for a while the perma-links were utterly keffed for no good reason. That problem now seems to be sorted having administered a swift virtual boot to Blogger’s gonads.

Haloscan’s still playing silly buggers and losing comments, but they’re working on it.

All in all, a semi-frustrating day of website problems I could do feck all about. Apologies (again) to those whose comments have disappeared into the great golloping chasm in reality.

Birthday mentions

Happy 1st Blog birthday to ScaryDuck and also to Gert.

Also, Happy Birthday to Gert proper, not just her Blog.