A frightening glimpse into an alien world
Thursday, 31 January 2008
As you will no doubt have noticed, this site looks a bit different today. I’ve got me a new super-minimalist theme called Stripped by Upstart Blogger. I’m a fan of minimal, functional design and, since the emphasis round these parts is on words, this theme is perfect because all the other distracting stuff is dumped at the bottom. Plus, the text is big and clear so you don’t have to squint at the screen, culminating in migraines and laser eye surgery.
The theme only works in Wordpress 2.3 so this was an incentive to install it, although the process very nearly ended in disaster thanks to my limited technical ability. I genuinely think I went into shock as I realised - mistakenly, as it turned out - that I had deleted the entire site, including all my posts.
Thankfully, I managed to sort it out and I now have tags, which are properly supported in the new version of Wordpress for the first time. (Tags and categories are very different beasts so my previous method of using categories in the same way as tags was becoming extremely cumbersome. Now, though, they’ve been handily separated out.)
Anyroad, this is becoming rather navel-gazing and tech-geeky so I will return to my usual terrain with some low-brow observations about Lorraine Kelly.
I switched on GMTV this morning for a change and witnessed the most toe-curlingly dim-witted interview I’ve seen in a long time. Lorraine was interrogating Coleen McLoughlin and, after a sticky opener in which “the face of George at Asda” managed to mention, er, George at Asda, Coleen faced this shocking curveball from her inquisitor:
I think you’ve done so well because you’re so nice and everybody likes you.
There’s not a lot you can say to that so I left the room. When I came back I saw the film review section, where pundit James King (annoying; thinks he’s Mark Kermode but isn’t) was attempting to explain the premise of Cloverfieldto Ms Kelly. I was reminded of my own recent attempts to explain Sky Plus to my nan. “So, you see, it’s not really a documentary Lorraine, it’s just shot in that style, like the Blair Witch Project? Oh, never mind. Have you had your tablets?”
They then showed that dull clip, where an unconvincing CGI version of the Statue of Liberty’s head smashes into an unconvincing CGI version of a bit of Manhattan pavement. Lorraine nearly crapped herself. She actually screamed:
That’s the head from the… the Statue of Liberty!
King explained about the internet-based marketing campaign and I sensed her eyes glazing over. He might as well have been describing Facebook to a polar bear.
I used to think BBC Breakfast News was tediously cuddly-wuddly but this was extreme. Having watched it, I was given a terrifying glimpse into a bizarre alien world, the like of which I had never previously considered. As such, I now know how it feels to be a disorientated middle-aged woman. It was a peculiar start to the day.
No. 1 — February 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
As opposed to a disorientated middle-aged man who sits around in his new leather jacket pretending he knows everything and thinks is ‘down with the kids’.
No. 2 — February 10th, 2008 at 8:09 am
When I was sitting in my local fracture clinic watching GMTV, wondering why the hospital TV was tuned into ITV complete with adverts for heart-killing fast food, Lorraine Kelly said ginger people are dying out due to cross breeding with non-redheads. What she doesn’t know about cinema, she does know about hair.