I am a terrible artist. I can see things in my head, but there is some kind of communication lost between my imagination and my hand, so that a pencil drawing ends up looking terrible. Nevertheless, I recently got lost in a world of “how to draw” videos on YouTube, and when I realised it was Baby Panda Thursday today, I thought the two things would combine quite nicely.

This week was over before I really knew about it, which is odd because it felt like a really mismatched weeks. Sometimes I thought I hadn’t been running for ages, sometimes it felt like I was tying up my shoelaces all the time. Nevertheless, the end of the Fitness Class is creeping up on me. After this week, there are just four workouts left. Goodness knows what I’ll do after that.

Overall, I’d say the film was entertaining. There was a lot of firefighting, plenty of action, although there were some hardhitting moments to go with it. A lot of the emotional moments were just too cliched though. Oh, wait, there’s a marine who has a pregnant wife back home? Who’d have thought it? And oh, they need a pep talk because they don’t quite trust their sergeant’s motives? Some stock lines coming right up. It was cliched everywhere.

Let’s come at this from the very beginning then. At the end of the last half of the series, I said I wasn’t bothered about watching the rest. I knew I was going to watch this first episode to see where they took it, but the rest was up for grabs. As much as I love the Doctor, there are other ways I can spend an hour on a Saturday night.

I have read one Salman Rushdie book before, and it took me three months to plough my way through it. They are not my style at all, but as this one appeared on the list I have chosen as part of my Life List, I was ready to give it a try. The trouble I have is that I can’t wade through the strange construction of sentences. There are some great descriptions, some lovely lines of text, but it’s so hard to get to them. The characters seem almost incidental to the underlying story, but I could never figure out what the story was trying to get to either.

Split into two parts, the first covers the story in detail - in this case, from the appearance of Stalin to the introduction of Yeltsin, via the Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the rise and fall of multiple presidents and prime ministers. The second half is the appendix, with a quick overview of the main characters involved in the subject, and then a great timeline for just the key facts in the order they happened.

This baby panda looks how I feel today. As always, watch with the sound down, because for whatever reason, being in a zoo makes people screech.

I was really looking forward to The Hour, a six part series on the BBC that followed some 1950s Beeb journalists setting up a news programme called, funnily enough, The Hour. It was compared to Mad Men from the outset, but it wasn’t much like that crazy advertising world. In fact, the only real similarity was the bad hair and the constant chain-smoking. After the first episode, I wasn’t sure I was going to keep watching. I couldn’t really reconcile the spy plot with the TV studio storyline, and I really wanted it to focus on one or the other. However, I gave it another episode, and then I was hooked… which was unfortunate because I found it quite slow-going.

Turns out, it was a lot better than I was expecting. Far more of a comedy than a romance. It took them a while to get together, and even though there was an inevitable falling out/making up bit, it really wasn’t dominating the second half of the film. I laughed out loud quite a lot, and I really enjoyed the kookiness of Drew’s character. Hugh played the same character as he has in a gazillion other films, but the partnership between the two was great fun.

I’ve talked about David Mitchell’s Soapbox before, I love the rants and most of them are as if he has read my mind. It’s into the third series now, but never before has one been so identical to how I feel. Even if he is speaking through a “gradgrindish persona adopted for comic effect” all of it is spot on.

A pretty quiet week. The distances have been creeping up which I find disconcerting because a) I don’t really have the time to run more than 7km, given how slow I am and b) training for a 5k should not involve an 11k, should it? That’s not this week, but in a couple of weeks time. Bah! If I could do 11k just like that, then all that 10k related angst will be embarrassing. Nevertheless, on to this week’s fun and games.

Google has made doodling famous, but the practice of scribbling away when someone is talking is still considered rude and/or bad practice. I’ve never really pondered this fact until recently, when I became aware of the Doodle Revolution. Sunni Brown heads up the revolution, with an aim of changing the perception of doodlers from inattentive listeners to engaged ears, and reviewing working practices to make creativity a bigger part.

Mmm, Back to the Future. I love to browse the branded t-shirts, but I never really buy them because once I start, I think I would become bankrupt quite quickly. However, I was looking at BTTF related t-shirts recently, I forget why, and these are my favourite five that I stumbled across. Dr. E. Brown Enterprises I like the ones that aren’t supremely obvious, so whilst all Back to the Future fans should get it from the front, it would probably take the back to really make it clear what the t-shirt was all about. A big ol’ flux capacitor is hard to miss. I like that it also looks like a lot of music or band t-shirts you can get. “24 Hour Science Services.” I wonder what kind of services you might need in the dead of night.

A beautiful little animation. It’s sad at the end, but the description on Vimeo suggests it “sets off the compassion of an imaginative little boy” which I think can only be a good thing.

This is one of the best films I’ve seen in ages. It had everything going for it. There was plenty of action, without too much over-the-top CGI. It made you think, without being bamboozling. There was an excellent twist at the end, and a few questions left over, without being annoying. And, there was emotion and romance, without making me uncomfortable. I really don’t think I can fault it.

After my rather foolish admission that I hadn’t necessarily paid much attention to those that went to the moon after the main three, Steven Roy recommended I watch this documentary film on 4OD - In the Shadow of the Moon. I watched, and I learned, and I made notes. I’ve posted the distilled version for Film Watch, but these are the full notes I made along the way - 90 minutes of brilliant space travel stuff, I highly recommend it.

I loved it! I think I was expecting it to teach me a bit more, perhaps be more educational rather than emotional, but it was brilliant throughout, and did give me a taste for the many different missions that went up to the moon. I loved hearing from the astronauts themselves, particularly right at the end when they talked about how their space travel had affected them, and what they think of the conspiracies.

When JK Rowling announced Pottermore, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The Harry Potter books are some of the few physical novels that I still own, and I haven’t wanted to dispose of them until I had an ebook copy to replace it with. It’s been driving me crazy, as I only own six of the seven books, and that gap on the shelf is hard to live with. However, I don’t want to buy the missing item, only to dispose of it later.

When this movie got going, it was brilliant. As soon as she was outed, it really got interesting. All the build up to that, though, I could barely understand let alone get involved in. I would have rather seen more of the aftermath and how they fought their way out, than the hour that was spent explaining the situation in the first place.

When I was younger, I hoarded magazines, and would cut nice stuff out and paste them into books. Mmm, nice stuff. I’ve just found the site Polyvore, which essentially allows you to do that but in a digital fashion. I’ve seen people doing this for ages, sometimes they call them mood boards, but I just think it’s fun. Polyvore provides you with a gazillion choices, whether it is fashion or interior design, or just something a little bit arty, and you piece together the bits you like to form a full outfit or a room.

Yesterday, the BBC screened a feature length documentary following the Team GB gymnastics squad as they trained ahead of the 2008 Olympics. It was called “Gymnast”. It started at the very beginning, before the six gymnasts had been chosen, and followed many more hopefuls as they tried to get selected. Hopes and dreams, and all that, it was interesting to see the dynamic between girls, their family, and the coaches. The pressure on those taking exams at the exact same time as the Olympic trials, the worry of those who got injured and whether they would be fit in time.

We’re now on the second page of the calendar for this class. It started in July and ends in August, and that means this is the home stretch. Kinda. I’m still a few days behind schedule, so it’ll probably be September for me, but still. It’s going okay so far. Unusually, this week has four runs, with the last one being a 5k - presumably to see if you’ve got any faster. I’m not holding my breath!

So far, my blogging about media has been limited to films, Doctor Who and The Archers, with the occasional one-off if a piece of viewing really inspires me. It’s something of a dream of mine to have enough time and dedication to blog about TV more often, and I do have some vague plans to do more of it. Here are five blogs that inspire me in that direction, and are great reads.

I don’t know if it’s because I read the second and third parts back to back, but I did find this one exhausting. Nothing ever goes right, people are always getting hurt, and at one point, even Katniss admits no one should be able to survive what she’s going through. She’s constantly breaking down and having to rebuild herself, just in time for something to break her down again. It is pretty gruelling and draining to read.

You’ll remember that earlier in the year I went to my first (and probably only) football match, and somehow became an Aston Villa fan. I vaguely followed what they were doing for a few weeks, and then sort of lost touch until the season ended. Mr C and I watched the occasional Match of the Day update, but even then only if we happened to be in the right place at the right time - it’s not allowed on the iPlayer.

I don’t know much about fashion. I’m the kind of person that has a few staple items, and a few other bits I love and that’s about it. I detest clothes shopping, but I don’t mind ogling some of the sites where people show off their outfits each day. I found this video, which takes the idea of a staple to extremes. To help raise money for charity, Sheena set up the Uniform Project - wearing the same little black dress every day for a year (or the same style dress anyway, I assume there was some washing involved).

It took me a while to get back into it, remember the characters and who did what in the previous book, but the story gets off to quite a slow start, allowing you time to get your head back in the Panem world. I wasn’t totally sold on the first half, the emphasis on the fake love was too much - I never believed it would solve anything, I’m confused why a smart girl like Katniss would think that.

I’m a bit torn on this one because when it was good, it was very, very good. Unfortunately the film was very up and down and there were some bits where I was wondering what on earth we had started watching. The beginning, in particular, is very drawn out, and quite heavy on the religion | even though faith doesn’t really seem to play much of a part in the story itself.

Stumbled across this video from March last year of a proposed underground mansion. Actually there are two videos, the first is a report from Granada which gives a clearer idea of what the mansion is all about. The second video has more images and less chatter from irritating presenters - it’s actually got no sound at all which is a little disconcerting. Here’s the first though: Video no longer available.

There’s plenty to guffaw at | perhaps a bus really could jump over a gap like that, but it really wouldn’t look like that when it landed. How can they scrape past all those cars and still stay above 50? No matter. Keanu is at his grumpy best, and if you discount the irritating mushy stuff, which is thankfully only a couple of scenes, then it’s my perfect film.

For those of us that watched the 2007 season, we already know how this story ends, but Hamilton uses his journalistic skills to delve behind the headlines we might have already seen and find out what made those involved make some of the decisions they did. It’s a remarkably unbiased piece of writing, considering the high emotions and questionable actions detailed along the way, and there are no significant conclusions drawn at the end. That’s by no means a bad thing, the book simply gives the reader the tools to make their own judgement.

The final stop on my Alphabet mini-tour (way back in May, how did that happen?) was the National Space Centre, just outside of Leicester. I’m developing an interest in all things space travel, and I was surprised that we have a space centre, given that we have very little in the way of a space programme. The website makes it clear that this is a destination designed for kids. At the moment, on the homepage, there’s a lego space shuttle, and three pictures of kids enjoying their day out at the centre. I was anticipating this when I went, and given my lack of any real space knowledge, I figured I’d do well to start with something aimed at the children. I was to be disappointed.

Last time we saw The Doctor, he was saving the world, keeping Rose from imploding and taking one for the team, by forcing a regeneration. David Tennant had just a moment to say Barcelona before the episode ended. Thus, his first full length episode is this Christmas Special. Although, he isn’t really in it for a lot of the action, so perhaps it’s harsh to call this his first episode. He spends most of his time relegated to a bed, or the floor of his ship, and 90% of the episode sees him in pyjamas - even the fighting at the end. I am not a fan of the pyjamas.

I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, and it also came recommended to us from a family member as well, so that’s double the pressure for the film to do well. Bradley Cooper seems to be everywhere at the moment, but I was not aware of Abbie Cornish’s work.

A great set of baby panda photos by jsteph on Flickr. Credit: jsteph/Flickr

This month has been dominated by two main stories - the scarecrow rivalry, and the E.Coli outbreak at Pat and Tony’s. Firstly, the scarecrow battle. It was interesting to see how all the parties reacted to the efforts to make a bigger and better scarecrow. It seems Will has forgiven Emma for everything that has gone before, whilst his hatred for Ed just keeps on getting bigger. Both parties were keen to get their extended family involved, and luckily for everyone, little Georgie managed to win from both sides. I wonder if Lewis was being somewhat diplomatic with the decision.

As ever, Jack is partnered with a young, up and coming chap who thinks he is completely useless and is proved wrong on more than one occasion. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this formula, I’m curious if the final two books keep up this same concept, or if there is another kind of relationship that could be attempted.

Mr C has instructed me to make a note of this conversation. Me: “I don’t know why it’s so hot.” Mr C: “It’s summer.” “I want winter back.” “No you don’t.” “I’ll never complain about being cold again. Next time I complain about it being cold, punch me in the face and remind me of this moment.” “Blog it, and I can link you back to it later.” I guess this is the 2.0 version of I told you so.

What I love about the repeats of Top of the Pops on BBC Four is seeing the 1970s for all the good and bad of music, fashion, and taste. Rather than the golden era montages, where the best and the iconic are selected for a rose-tinted package, this is full repeats of TOTP programmes that were running in 1976. It’s incredible. Noel Edmonds pretends to be a cameraman!

Again, I didn’t manage to run over the weekend which has put me rather behind schedule. Also, for this first one, I was slightly hampered by new-shoe-related injuries. Thing about taking some time off work is you forget how to wear posh shoes. Anyway, on with the running. Week 3, Day 15 Tricky run. My feet weren’t actually that much of a problem in the end, but I did find myself struggling in the final few running stints. That pesky thigh ache returned, along with a stitch, both on the right-hand side, so I suspect I might have been leaning over like the Hunchback of ND, or something. Because I wasn’t on top form, it took forever to cover the distance. I started to get my head around the conversion between miles and kilometres, which will definitely help in the future. I started to lose energy and motivation towards the end though. Could have done with one of those gels! (Not.)

At first, I liked it. Interesting direction, intriguing story, mostly good acting. Sadly, it all went a bit Bourne. There was a lot that didn’t make sense, a lot of plot holes that were hard to suspend my belief on. It was trying to be Bourne but it wasn’t good enough to make it. When it wasn’t trying to be Bourne, there were a whole heap of cliches involved.

Bower was alongside Ecclestone as he meandered through the Monaco Grand Prix last year, and that is where the biography begins, following Bernie as he hobnobs with the rich and famous. It’s a jarring way to begin the story, a first chapter filled with assumed knowledge and irrelevant characters. As a glimpse of Bernie’s presumably hectic and celebrity filled life, it does the job, but as a reader, it is about as off putting as a first chapter can be.

I actually had this post in mind yesterday, when I realised I’d spent quite a lot of time watching the action from the Swimming World Championships in China, and was loving it. Today, it seems to have taken on a different significance, given the news that F1 will be moving to Sky next year. However, these aren’t F1 replacements, just sports I’m starting to get more fond of, and want to see more of.

Really enjoyed this film, although it was not what I was expecting at all. I thought it was going to be all out comedy like we have seen recently, but it was far more serious than that. I also wasn’t aware until afterwards that this was a remake. The comedy that was in there was good though, laughed a lot and liked the story.

I just couldn’t figure this one out. It wasn’t too smooshy, so I figured it must be more of a comedy than a romantic comedy, but even then, it wasn’t crazy funny. Paul Rudd was brilliant, and I did like some of the conversations between Witherspoon and Wilson. The peripheral people were nowhere near as good. It almost felt like they were all given a bit of a skit - the dad going on about stuff, the assistant wanting to tell him things - but they just felt long and didn’t work for me.

Oh, how I have so loved having Back to the Future back in my life. Not that it ever went anywhere, but fresh material, and most importantly good fresh material has been brilliant. I have already blogged every episode of the TellTale Game revival, and whilst I do not have much more to add now I have completed episode five, it seemed only fair to have a farewell post to complete the set.

The new Apple operating system, Lion, was released last week and I volunteered to be the test pilot for our house. At first, I wasn’t that fussed about it but gradually, the more I use it, the more I notice, and there are some bits and bobs that have caught my attention. Here are five of them: Natural scrolling. I turned off the natural scrolling straight away. They can call it natural all they like, but it doesn’t feel natural to me. Thankfully, this is something they give you a preference option for, so it was easy to switch back. Missing buttons. I was busy editing a podcast and thought I was going crazy when I kept moving my mouse in search of some left and right buttons on the scrollbar and they weren’t there. After too many muscle memory moments, I checked with Mr C and he quickly ascertained that I wasn’t mad, they were gone. I hadn’t even updated the software but lo and behold, something had been changed without telling me. Apparently, the idea is that everything in Lion is geared towards gestures on the trackpad, so who needs buttons when you can swipe two fingers left or right? I can’t stand the trackpad. Autosave. At first, I was mildly concerned about the concept of autosaving. It’s been gradually more prevalent in software, but usually with the control still ultimately resting with the user to save. The way it has been done in Lion seems interesting, and it’s not that often I need to go back on a version anyway, so I can’t see it being a huge problem. It does annoy me that sometimes a document can be a bit sticky as it’s working out where it is in terms of saving, and I opened up something that said it was locked because I hadn’t used it for two weeks. Like it’s my operating software’s business how often I open my files. Launchpad. I do love the new little Launchpad icon. It’s like a Windows Start button but for my Mac. That is something I’ve missed since switching, and having it right back is excellent. Accessing the Applications folder at the click of a button is brillo, although it may take me a while to organise the stuff within it into groups I like. Little upgrades. There are nice little features tucked away that don’t get shouted about, like the way folders unfurl when you open them within finder, or the preview that appears when you search for something in Spotlight. Any way of making Spotlight more useful is good in my book. Plenty more still to learn, I’m sure, and I envisage getting angry and being pleasantly surprised in equal measures as I continue to uncover new stuff. For now, it’s a pretty smooth transition to Lion, but I do think the heavy emphasis on gestures is going to get annoying.

I did very much enjoy the concept and the story, and there were only a few bits that grated. Choosing Hitler seems like quite an obvious subject for time travel, which isn’t bad, but is perhaps overused. Having said that, if it gets people interested in history, then it’s probably a good thing. Some of the next books in the series also feature well known periods, and it’s probably a good way to get people involved in the story.

One of Mr C’s biggest complaints with the iPod and iPad stems from the idea of touching the screen and your big thumbs getting in the way. Particularly when you are playing games, controlling whatever is on screen with your not-particularly-see-through-hands can be tricky. It’s a valid complaint, although I always argue that the ease of the iPad far outweighs a technical little issue like that. We were perusing some iPad accessories and stumbled across the AluPen from Just Mobile. I’m not very knowledgeable in the world of styluses… styli… style… pen type things, and this does just seem to be a regular point and touch device with no bells and whistles.

Whilst watching Wimbledon this year, Mr C questioned what those tennis players were consuming when they squeezed little gel packets into their mouths. I assumed they were some kind of gel thing for top sportspeople, but then I realised they sell them in the supermarket. We decided to try some. Eww. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a sweet treat or anything but this was not good. It tasted like medicine, and as a gel it was all gooey and gross. I didn’t particularly feel any extra energy but then I wasn’t in the midst of a mammoth tennis game either.